Bring down the power
Never a place to shy away from ridiculous controversies that manage to obfuscate real issues T&T is currently embroiled in a tempest over the planned purchase of a Bombardier private jet. It all started with jet envy when the Jamaican PM at the time Portia Simpson Miller paid us a visit and arrived in a private jet. Our PM looked most perturbed at the time that he hadn’t thought of such a nifty means of transportation. The look on his face expressed such pain and envy that only the blindest of observers could fail to notice. I suspect the plan was hatched at that point but not too much later Manning took a “demo” flight on a private jet courtesy Bombardier. This caused a bit of a flare up from the opposition benches but they were assured that it was just a joy ride and nothing should be read into it.
Cut to the present. We now learn that Caribbean Airlines which takes its orders from the government is buying a Bombardier jet using $60 million of government aka taxpayers money so that they can “make it available to the regional market”. Uh huh. Naturally, Mr. Manning has said he will need to make a great deal of use of it for his ACS duties etc. You would think he was conducting shuttle diplomacy rather than just wasting time on a number of make work projects for associations that will eventually accomplish nothing. The opposition and several other interest groups are now up in arms about this planned development. I suspect they are happy because after Caribbean Airlines backed down on their ill-fated plan to place the PNM party symbol on the tails of their fleet it left them with no obvious distracting subject to concentrate on. The government is literally spending billions on numerous mega projects all of which are, no doubt ,riddled with corruption but it is more interesting to argue about a plane. Such is the nature of Trinidad politics and our national attention span.
The rule of the game is if you are mucking up royally and not addressing a myriad of social problems or ensuring that all citizens have equality under the law then by all means waste a small amount of money in a really ostensible way. It is the political equivalent of a farmer throwing some feed to the pigs so he can sneak into the pen and do whatever he has to do.
I suppose now that he has the Moorish architectural monstrosity that only someone with no taste could love as a residence he needs to be able to ferry visitors in so they can play twister or whatever in the grand ballroom.
